Work At Home

In this post I’ll teach you how to work at home, in your own time, without sacrificing your income.

If you always wanted to work from home, and go full-time remote, but where afraid of losing your salary, you are not alone. I’ve talked with many of would-be remote workers over the years and they always tell me the same thing: They are afraid to give up their salary in their efforts to pursue a better life.

But here’s the issue: when you are working a job in someone’s office, you are losing more than just the time in your office. You’re giving up your freedom to take calls whenever you need. You are giving up on attending local meetups, webinars, and conferences. While you are working for someone else, you are simply forfeiting your ability to make any meaningful income outside of your fixed salary.

This is where the fear is rooted. Because it is so hard to get remote work with clients while you are working a full-time job, many people think that means they would simply fail where they to attempt to go full-time for themeselves.

If this sounds like you, then I’ve got something I want you to know:

You can work at home, on your own schedule, on what you want, and make even more than you do now

If you are reading this post right now, I already know you have what it takes. You wouldn’t be here reading this if you weren’t curious, and ready to learn the process. Whatever your profession is, whether it’s programming, design, or writing, I believe in your ability to turn your job in to a business.

To work at home, and make the same or more than you make now, all you have to do is build an engine of sales. An engine of sales is a repeatable process where you can invest either your time or your money, and get in return new customers. While every industry is different and your work may be entirely different from mine, I will tell you this now… It does not matter what kind of work you do, you can turn it in to a business, and work from home.

Even if you have never run a business before, if you implement an engine of sales, you will learn the ropes of business faster than you think. The best part is, you don’t need millions of dollars to start your own business either! By building an engine of sales, and producing paying customers from the start, you can have you first customers fund your business expenses.

Building an engine of sales

Many would be freelancers and entrepreneurs go through a feast and famine cycle with their work. Sometimes they have too much work, while other times they suffer from not having any. This is because they rely on word-of-mouth or random referrals for business too much, instead of building an engine of sales.

There is a better way.

What you need is an engine of sales. As I’ve said, an engine of sales is any mechanism where you put in money or time, and out of the other end comes qualified prospects. An example of a working engine of sales is web ads. If put $15 in to an online ad, and produce valid leads out of that, then you can control your own fate.

Identify your ideal target customer

The first step to building an engine of sales, so that you can work at home, is to identify your ideal target customer. It’s important to not set your sights too broadly. Remember, when your approach is to appeal to everyone, you will end up actually appealing to noone!

To help identify your ideal target customer, ask yourself these questions about your line of work and who might buy from you.

What problem do they have that you can help theme solve?

Who has already bought from you?

Who are my competitors, and what is on their marketing materials?

How old are they?

What gender? M/F, or both?

What is their job title / occupation?

What is their education level?

What do they value?

If they needed to hire you, what might they search for on Google?

As you answer these questions, you’ll not only be able to build a model of your perfect customer, but these questions can also help to narrow down your offerring in to a concise and clear USP (Unique Selling Proposition).

Express a clear Unique Selling Proposition

What can you do better than the next guy? That, in a nutshell, is your USP. Once you identify your USP, you can set up an inexpensive wordpress blog, and start writing about your unique skill. This is the most common way to approach content marketing, and it pays off (for example, I’m doing it right now!)

Once you’ve got a website with your contact info and your unique selling proposition on it, you can start advertising! This is where your website becomes part of the engine of sales.

Using the customer model we created above, come up with some ideal keywords your target customer would use, and sign up for Google AdWords. Here you can target advertisements directly at your target customer at the exact moment that they are looking to hire someone like you. Create several variations of your ad targeting multiple keywords, so you can experiment and see which approach works best. Take it easy at first, maybe only running $20 worth of ads per week, and keep checking back on which ads get the best click-through rate. Once you’ve determined one (or a few) working ads, you can drive your engine of sales by simply upping the budgets.

Get to work!

Now that you’ve got your engine of sales flowing, you can get on the phone with your customers, tell them about your services and the pricing, and start making deals! Your first few customers are going to be critical to help you understand how to efficiently run your business. Be sure to review at least weekly what is going well, and what is not. Make notes of things that aren’t going well and start creating processes to correct these issues.

This is a dense topic, and there is a lot more to it, but this post is already long enough, so I’ll see you on the next one!